Leagues Apart

With the IRFU’s All-Ireland League barely alive, attempts by Rugby League to foster a relationship here have met with a frosty reception from Landsdown Road. Brendan O’Brien investigates.

IT'S one hundred and nine years since the rugby-loving working-class of Yorkshire and Lancashire said their good-byes to the union game and formed their own Northern Rugby Football Union, thus giving birth to the sister code of Rugby League.

As momentous occasions go in the oval ball game, it still stands second only to the day in 1823 when William Webb Ellis, "with fine disregard for the rules of football (soccer) as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game".